I Work Hard So My Cat Can Have A Better Life

My diminutive skeleton-boy stuffed toy, whose cap is signed:

To Lorena / Love, Tim Burton

(From his 2006 meet ‘n greet event in promotion of the DVD release of Corpse Bride at the Union Square Virgin Records store. Shown next to a favorite cat mug for scale, as well as a reference to my previous post, the short essay Hello, Kitty: Appreciating the Catwoman of Tim Burton’s Batman Returns.)

Fun fact:  Tim Burton and I share a birthday -- August 25th!

Hello, Kitty

Appreciating the Catwoman of Tim Burton's "Batman Returns"

Among the many memorable screen entrances of Hollywood enchantresses, Gilda and Jessica Rabbit made two of the sultriest introductions I can recall as an impressionable girl growing up with a VCR and liberally-appointed movie library in the early 1990s. Yet even these two legends of celluloid barely hold a (Roman) candle to the explosive cartwheeling that Catwoman brings to Tim Burton’s Batman Returns.

Licking my wounds and still seething from recent (and long-past) male sexual infractions, I was inspired this weekend to revisit that 1992 fantasy tour-de-force. And you can sure bet your popcorn it delivered, providing a bizarrely satisfying, unapologetically confident symbolic avatar for my pent-up poisons. In a tight and tense two hours Michelle Pfeiffer’s Selina Kyle more than reclaims power over her personal narrative. Hers is a supporting, supplicant, cowering “corn dog” character (as she herself self-berates) that quickly gets rewritten as a modern, self-actualized black-widow-type temptress. It’s a jaw-dropping, almost absurdly provocative transformation from doormat-dormouse to vixen-vigilante, punisher-panther, amazon-avenger. No longer is she a sad sack trembling wallflower and acquiescing (literal) pushover stammering through mundane secretarial duties for Gotham’s multi-millionaire business tycoon Max Shreck (a sneering, staccato-voiced Christopher Walken in guy-liner and Amadeus hair). Instead, Pfeiffer’s iconic antihero is hellbent on strictly serving her *own* soured-milk vendetta — however twisted, cynical, and misguided it may be. She is steered by a furious thirst for undiluted, ice-cold retribution, ultimately sacrificing all but one of her nine lives to seeing through with her deadly reprisals. “A kill for a kill” she insists to Max, he himself having casually thrust her out of a skyscraper office window when she unearthed his schemes while obediently toiling after hours on the company payroll.

But what in all this cascade of chaos does she want? Whatever she toyingly conveys with the erotic black-latex jumpsuit it’s certainly not to be wooed nor to settle-down — Selina won’t even let Danny DeVito’s circus-freak Penguin (née Oswald Cobblepot) lay a deformed finger-flipper on her person. “Money. - Jewels. - A *very* big ball of string,” suggests the foppish Walken, aiming to negotiate before his inevitable demise. No, she can’t be bought. Or had. “Bruce, I would… I would love to live with you in your castle forever just like in a fairytale. I just couldn’t live with myself,” she flatly informs Michael Keaton’s Batman as he watches, aghast and horrified, by the subsequent electrocution of her former employer, delivered with what proves to be a high-wattage smile in the truest sense. In my mind, her words summon comparison to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a certainly less violent romantic soufflé —but a film classic also threaded with an unmistakable female/feline metaphor. While frantically searching for her escaped ginger tabby, Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) responds to a man’s proposal of love with: “People don’t belong to people. …I’ll never let ANYONE put me in a cage.” Thirty-one years later, as Madonna’s Express Yourself was championing girl-power over the airwaves, Catwoman offered males everywhere the same sentiment, albeit in a more deranged delivery. “As a woman, I can’t be taken for granted,” Pfeiffer’s shock-red lips famously purr. “Life’s a bitch — now so am I.”

This cat’s out of the bag, and fellas, 

she’s not going back in.

Meowvelous.